Runaways

Paper Towns

Posted on October 1, 2013 by webmaster

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Paper Towns
by John Green

Quentin Jacobsen, 17, has been in love with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, for his entire life. A leader at their Central Florida high school, she has carefully cultivated her ‘bad-ass’ image. Quentin is one of the smart kids. His parents are therapists and he is, above all things, “goddamned well adjusted.”

He takes a rare risk when Margo appears at his window in the middle of the night. They drive around righting wrongs via her brilliant, elaborate pranks. Then she runs away (again). He slowly uncovers the depth of her unhappiness and the vast differences between the real and imagined Margo.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
850L	High School	320	Romance	2009	014241493

Stitches

Posted on September 30, 2013 by webmaster

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Stitches: A Memoir
by David Small

The story starts when the narrator is six years old and follows him into adulthood, with most of the story spent during his early adolescence. The youngest member of a silent and unhappy family, David is subjected to repeated x-rays to monitor sinus problems. When he develops cancer as a result of this procedure, he is operated on without being told what is wrong with him. The operation results in the loss of his voice, cutting him off even further from the world around him.

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Small’s black and white pen and ink drawings are endlessly perceptive as they portray the layering of dream and imagination onto the real-life experiences of the young boy. Small’s intuitive morphing of images, as with the terrible post-surgery scar on the main character’s throat that becomes a dark staircase climbed by his mother, provide deep emotional echoes. Some understanding is gained as family secrets are unearthed, but for the most part David fends for himself in a family that is uncommunicative to a truly ghastly degree.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
750L	Middle School	329	Autobiography	2010	0393338967

Giver

Posted on September 28, 2013 by webmaster

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The Giver
by Lois Lowrey

In the ‘ideal’ world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children’s adolescent, sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community’s Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are ‘released’ –to great celebration– at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also ‘released’, but with no fanfare.

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Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment: the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society’s collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
660L	Middle School	192	Science Fiction	2002	00440237688

Catcher in the Rye

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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The Catcher in the Rye

by J. D. Salinger

Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences.

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Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
790L	High School	288	Adventure	2001	0316769177

Chessie Bligh

Posted on September 18, 2013 by webmaster

Chessie Bligh
by Thora Gabriel

Chessie Bligh is a parentally neglected fourteen year old girl whose only friend is her Shih Tzu puppy named Wugghert. Out of defiance towards her absentee parents, Chessie trades places with another girl named Aelyn whom she encounters when their airplane flights from Europe to America (to attend boarding schools) is delayed in New York.

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Chessie, taking the place of Aelyn, arrives in Sterntaler, where she discovers a hidden elf encampment at the north rim of the Grand Canyon which is hidden from discovery by humans through the use of magic. That’s also where Chessie discovers that she has magical powers and can change the course of history. But there is a fourteen year old series of elfin murders she must solve and a killer to bring to justice. Chessie also comes to realize that Sternfaler isn’t so much a place as it is a multidimensional world where shape shifting, spells, and magical creatures abound. Most of all, Sternfaler is where her elf destiny begins!

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
640	Middle School	292	Fantasy	2006	0595835791